The Most Forbidden Knowledge: 151 Things NO ONE Should Know How to Do

Summary

* Stage a coup * Swim with sharks * Beat a breathalyzer *

The Forbidden Knowledge series has taken readers over the edge before, but never like this. The Most Forbidden Knowledge jam-packs the best and baddest how-tos into one car-stealing, keg-kicking, base-jumping-off-a-skyscraper collection. You'll find everything you ever wanted to learn (though probably never should) in this ultimate self-destruction manual.

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The Most Forbidden Knowledge - Michael Powell

Seeker

1. Start a Riot

Sounds like a tall order, huh? Not really. It’s very easy to manipulate a group of people if you know something that they don’t, and it only takes a few individuals to define the situation for everyone else. Of course, the best thing about a riot is that you get to break stuff and loot.

1. Get a bunch of your friends to dress as Los Angeles cops, then video them kicking the crap out of a black taxi driver. Post the footage on YouTube and watch the sparks fly.

2. Go to a march in Seattle and start smashing store windows. Soon local criminals will join the fray and start looting the downtown shops. The police will be poorly prepared and understaffed, and will be unable to stop the looters from running amok. Under pressure from federal officials, the city will declare an emergency and call in the National Guard.

3. Assemble a group of friends, dress up as activists, and attend a demonstration where there are lots of hard-core nuts, like animal rights protesters. Then get a couple of braver friends (who are dressed as police officers) to start pushing you around at a prearranged signal, using unreasonable force. This will get the crowd jittery, so that the moment one of the cops accidentally kicks your dog, or steps on your hamster (which you have conveniently left on the ground), violence will erupt on the streets, and within half an hour you’ll be enjoying a roaring spectacle as water cannon meets Molotov cocktail.

4. Go to a funeral service for victims who died in the last riot. There will be lots of tears and sobbing as well as rage and anxiety desperate for an outlet. All you have to do is throw a brick into a crowd of mourners and the whole thing will kick off.

5. Get a job in Starbucks in New York City. Wait for a killer heat wave and then offer free iced coffee to the first hundred customers.

2. Become an Assassin

All you need to get started in the tough and glamorous world of contract killing is to place a classified ad that euphemistically expresses your gun-for-hire credentials. It is well-known in underworld circles that 60 percent of pest control adverts are actually selling the services of hit men: Professional pest control: we have been helping homeowners, businesses, and deranged oligarchies solve their extermination problems since 1972. Send a manila envelope with your details to … discretion is our profession …

When your first assignment comes in one morning, you’re in business; it’s time, as they say in hit man circles, to go to work.

Rifle Assassination

Your method of dispatching your target will depend on the weapons that you keep under your bed (all thanks to the Second Amendment). If you have a rifle, you can stay concealed and shoot from a distance; if you’ve only got a pistol, then you’ll probably need to pose as a delivery person and gun them down when they open their front door wearing their pajamas. Any assassin who wants to be taken seriously should own a range of weapons, so we’ll assume that you have a rifle.

The first rule of rifle assassination is to stay concealed. This means masking shiny or reflective items on your body and face (follow a regular skin-care regime to avoid oily patches), and eliminate unnecessary movement. Always go to the bathroom before a hit—you may not have another opportunity for several hours.

There are six basic positions of concealment: above, below, beside, behind, inside, and in front. Beware of silhouetting when you’re on a roof or of getting trapped (never move into a space with only one escape route).

Aiming Your Rifle

Grip the handle with your right hand and bring it up to your face. The rifle should be parallel to the ground. Place the barrel in your open left hand and then curl your fingers around it. Keeping the left arm bent and the elbow tucked into the body, raise the right elbow so that your arm is parallel with the ground, and tuck the rifle butt into the front of your right shoulder. Take aim.

Allow for the influence of wind and other factors that affect the fall of the bullet. Breathe steadily and normally, and do not hold your breath as you squeeze the trigger.

Keep Practicing

Buy a video game system and practice killing for money: there are lots to choose from including Oblivion, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin, and Assassin’s Creed to name but three.

3. Cheat on Your Partner

Whether you are a man or a woman, it’s time to face the fact that monogamy is unnatural. Sexual fidelity is virtually nonexistent in nature (sure, some species, mostly birds, are socially monogamous, but few are sexually monogamous). We all come from a long line of successful breeders and it is hard-wired into our genes to play away from home. Did you know that 85 percent of human cultures before the Judeo-Christian homogenization were polygamous? So what’s the best way to do it?

1. The most important rule is DON’T GET CAUGHT. Cheated-on partners can do some extreme things when they discover they’ve been duped.

2. Don’t date two people in the same city, otherwise you’re bound to bump into one while out on a date with the other.

3. When you’re on a date, always answer your cell phone; ignoring calls is a quick route to raising suspicion.

4. Develop a reputation in your relationships of being a bad liar; allow yourself to get caught lying badly over something trivial and your partner won’t suspect that you could give lessons to Richard Nixon.

5. Be prepared for double-dating to take up twice your energy; eat healthily and exercise regularly: you’ll need every bit of stamina you’ve got.

6. If you’re living with your partner, never bring your affair home, as alien pubes in the soap dish or between the sheets are a dead giveaway.

7. When covering your tracks, always base your lies on the truth and pay attention to small details. Also, don’t lie unless absolutely necessary: if you lie all the time, no one will believe you.

9. Don’t be tempted to spill the beans if your partner suggests a threesome or swinging; it may be a trap to make you fess up to your cheating.

10. If your partner discovers you’ve been cheating and you can’t see yourself spending the rest of your life together, it is the ideal time to break free and get out. There’s no point acting all repentant and spending months trying to rebuild trust for a relationship with no long-term future.

4. Free Dive Competitively

Bronzed streamlined bodies in the tightest fitting wetsuits imaginable descend to the depths of the ocean to see how long they can hold their breath before the light at the end of the tunnel tells them it’s time to return to the surface. If you prefer holding your breath and journeying to the outer limits of consciousness to sitting in the bar drinking a beer with your friends, here’s how to get started.

1. Watch Luc Besson’s dreamily ambient movie, The Big Blue, starring Jean Marc Barr as a mystical loon who falls in love with Rosanna Arquette and then dumps her for a dolphin. If that movie doesn’t make you hanker for the depths, nothing will.

2. Competitive free diving is currently governed by two world associations: AIDA International and CMAS. There are several disciplines to try out to find which suits you best:

Static apnea: timed breath holding in a swimming pool

Dynamic apnea: underwater swimming in a pool for distance; can be done with or without fins. There are six depth disciplines, which differ in the method of descent and ascent, of which no limits is the most sexy: you use any means of breath-holding to dive to depth using a weighted sled and return to the surface along a guideline with the help of an air-filled bag.

3. Meet other free divers to learn more about the sport, join an online discussion group, and go to the pool to practice.

Training

Fortunately, humans have the mammalian diving reflex. That means as soon as you dive to depth you will experience a drop in heart rate; your blood vessels will shrink and fill up with plasma to prevent your lungs from collapsing; and blood is directed away from the limbs to the heart, lungs, and brain.

One training method is the apnea walk. First you spend time spinning your chakras and getting all Zen, then take a few deep breaths, followed by a one-minute breath-hold taken at rest. Then you walk as far as you can without taking a breath (top free divers can walk for over 400 meters). This trains your muscles to operate under anaerobic conditions and to tolerate the buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood stream.

Hyperventilating before a dive lowers the level of carbon dioxide in your lungs and bloodstream, which fools your body into thinking that it is less starved of oxygen than it really is. However, it doesn’t raise the amount of oxygen, so most free divers only take three or four oxygenating breaths before a dive.

Always train and dive with a friend. Diving alone is the main cause of serious accidents. If you black out, you need a friend to drag you back to the surface and give you the kiss of life.

5. Escape from Prison

Only consider a jail break if you are on death row or serving a life sentence with little chance of parole. Otherwise, you would be wiser to do your time, unless conditions inside have become intolerable for other reasons, such as your having recently become another prisoner’s bitch or your broker needs a signature before he can offload some more pharmaceutical shares. It is worth considering the consequence of a failed escape attempt: solitary confinement, an increase in your sentence, or drowning in the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay.

Methods of Escape

If you are disorganized or lack the necessary temperament to plan and execute a getaway over several months, you would be more suited to an opportunistic escape: a door left unlocked, a faulty electric perimeter fence, etc. However, you may have to wait a long time for such an opportunity to present itself, time better spent tunneling a hole behind the toilet. Also, if you consider that the odds of one door being left unlocked is a hundred to one, then if you have to get through five doors to reach freedom, your chances of all five of them being unlocked at the same time is one in ten billion. To put this into perspective: you’re two million times more likely to die in the first thirty days after a total knee replacement surgery.

If, on the other hand, you are a meticulous planner, good with your hands, and a perfectionist problem-solver with an eye for detail like Martha Stewart, you should opt for a planned escape. If nothing else, your single-minded focus on breaking out will give you a sense of hope and purpose that is so often lacking in correctional facilities.

Getting Help

Whether you dig a tunnel, hide in a laundry sack, or start a riot, most prison breaks require assistance from others either inside or outside the prison. Those on the outside—friends and family—you can trust. However, getting people to help you in prison requires considerable interpersonal skills, and you must be prepared to forgo some of your luxuries (e.g., your toilet paper and cocaine ration) so that you can use them to bribe other inmates or even a prison guard to assist you and to keep quiet.

Plan B

If your escape plan fails, just continue to be clothed, fed, and housed by the state until massive federal budget cuts force the release of hundreds of prisoners.

6. Drill a Hole in Someone’s Skull

If you or a loved one has become possessed by an evil spirit or demon that is causing an illness or disease of some kind, your first step is to thrash, starve or torment the individual in an attempt to drive the spirit out to search for a more hospitable host. If that fails and their condition persists, you may be forced to follow the lead of generations of ancient man: trepanning. This is a process by which a section of the top of the skull is carefully removed so as to promote mental and physical well-being.

The ancients used trepanning with some success: many skulls show that the bone continued to grow around the hole, indicating that the patient did not die from the procedure. Trepanning was used for centuries to treat conditions as varied as common headaches to epilepsy and more serious mental disorders. With the advent of modern power tools and drugs, this procedure is considerably easier than it used to be.

Here’s what you do:

1. Concoct an ointment from herbs that are known to have a mild anesthetic quality, for example kava kava.

2. Apply the ointment generously to a small area at the top of the skull.

3. Cut away a flap of skin with sharp flint tools and fold back; do not cut away completely as you will need this later.

4. Make a series of small round holes in the skull with a power drill so that you have traced the outline of a small circle (if you want to be more traditional and unplugged, use a hand-cranked drill specifically designed to pierce the skull).

5. Cut between these holes with a pair of pruning shears until you have removed a section of the top of the skull completely.

6. Pay careful attention not to cut too deeply: you are not aiming to remove brain tissue, simply bone.

7. After surgery, stitch back the skull and cover with a sterile gauze to prevent infection. Allow your patient several months to recuperate.

7. Crash a Wedding

There are three common reasons for attending a wedding without an invitation: stealing food, getting laid, and mingling with celebrities. You may even hit pay dirt with the holy grail of wedding crashers: lucrative paparazzi shots.

Stealing Food

This is probably the least ambitious motivation for the wedding crasher, and may not even be cost effective. If you’ve had to spend several hundred dollars on an outfit to blend in with the wedding party, it is unlikely that you can recoup your initial expense, no matter how many salmon terrines you manage to stuff into your handbag. If a free meal ticket is your main goal, hit low-budget, low-class weddings, and accept that instead of lobster thermidor and caviar you are more likely to encounter quiches, sausages on sticks, and deviled eggs. On the plus side, there’s no need to hang around for the wedding speeches. In a high-class wedding, pretend to be one of the caterers, because after you’ve spent eight hours on your feet serving, you’ll get to finish off the vol-au-vents and other uneaten high-brow food (of which there will be plenty).

Getting Laid

Everyone knows that weddings are the place to get laid by horny bridesmaids. Dressing up a pretty young single woman in pink crinoline and forcing her to watch her best friend joined in holy matrimony is a surefire recipe for making her feel unloved and over-the-hill. That’s why all bridesmaids are up for it, but it’s also why you should avoid them: every other guy in the place will be hitting on them, leaving all the other females to fall for your charms.

The Celebrity Wedding

Don’t feel guilty about crashing a celebrity wedding. Sell your photographs to a national glossy magazine and everyone benefits: the magazine pays you a fortune, its circulation increases by a couple hundred thousand, and the celebrity couple sues them for $2 million for stress, loss of income, and damage to their professional careers.

Three Wedding Crashing Tips

Now you know why crashing a wedding is good news, here are three hows:

1. Wear a kilt if you’re a man, or take along a baby and breastfeed it if you’re a woman.

2. If the wedding clashes with an important sporting event, bring a portable radio and keep the male guests abreast of the score.

3. If you sit in Madonna’s seat, don’t pretend to be Madonna.

8. Smuggle Live Animals

People love pets. People especially love exotic pets. Help people get what they love by smuggling exotic pets into the country. There’s many different ways to get all sorts of animals by those pesky custom officials. You just have to get creative—and be ballsy. Whether you dare to walk through the airport with a monkey posing as a toupee or with a snake coiled around your chest, it’s up to you. Exude confidence and you’ll be all set … right?

Here’s a list of some of the most sought-after exotic animals:

1. PYGMY MARMOSET: The smallest of all monkeys, it’s native to the South American rainforests and could double as a toupee or possible tuft of chest hair if you plan on picking one up and flying it back to the States.

2. SHINGLEBACK SKINK: A short-tailed lizard that lives in Australia, its rough skin will cause some issues when you try to shove it down your pants to get it past airport security.

3. KEEL-BILLED TOUCAN: What better way to enjoy your morning Fruit Loops than with a live toucan perched on your kitchen counter? Apparently this is how a lot of people want to start off their days as these exotic birds are in high-demand. Road trip it to Bolivia and purchase one from a street vendor for cheap. Drive back up and sell it for big bucks.

4. SNOW LEOPARD: Head over to the Himalayas and see about coming into ownership of a baby snow leopard. These spotted wild cats can catch quite a price at an illegal exotic pet auction. Take your tabby with you when you head over to Asia, and swap him out with the leopard—hoping your old cat’s custom forms work for your new acquisition.

5. ROCK PYTHON: Travel to any African country south of the Sahara and see if you can purchase a rock python from any of the local vendors. You’ll most likely be able to pay pennies for the snake that will make you some major scratch back home. In terms of getting home—wrap the snake around your torso and waltz right through security. Just be careful things don’t get a little too tight.